Abstract: What we are seeing today has probably never happened in the history of computing. Faster and faster CPU's are churning out of the fab plants at what seems like a weekly basis. Before we can even get out hands on the fastest processor out there, an even faster processor comes and takes its place before we know it!65% Rating:

PR Numbers Explained

The
actual representation of the MII/PR-433 comes by the PR-rating or Pentium
equivalent rating. So a MII/PR433 would not necessarily mean that the CPU clock
runs at 433MHz. This basically an indicator that means the performance of a MII
would be equivalent to a Pentium CPU running at the same clock speed.

For instance, a Cyrix MII/433 actually
operates at a 300MHz clock speed but supposedly performs at a performance level
equal that of a Pentium 433. According to Cyrix, the x86 processor architecture
has diverged a great deal resulting in variations in clock speed and number of
instructions executed per clock cycle. It would not be fair to compare a Joshua
processor that runs at 300 million clock cycles per second against another CPU
running at 433 million clock cycles per second.

This is why the PR-rating has been used.
These PR ratings by Cyrix were derived from scores of CPU performance under the
Ziff-Davis Winstone suite.

Test Bed
Setup

Performance numbers say
it all. The following hardware was used to measure up the performance of the
Cyrix MII/433 CPU. As we are comparing between a Socket 7 based CPU and Celeron
is the Socket 370 base, 2 test bed setups had to be used. Most of the hardware
was kept the same. The only difference being in CPU and
motherboard.